Jim Zarkadas

Most B2B SaaS upgrade flows feel like paying a parking ticket. Cold. Transactional. Zero emotion. We just designed something different for @ZenMaid. A 3D animated badge that makes upgrading feel like unlocking the next level in a game. Here's the thinking behind it: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗺𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝘂𝗽𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗲 𝗳𝗹𝗼𝘄𝘀: They treat the moment like a transaction. "Enter card. Click confirm. Done." But upgrading is actually a milestone. The user is investing more in your product. They're betting on you. That deserves to feel like something. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗲 𝗱𝗶𝗱 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗱: We designed a 3D plan badge with gamified motion. When users upgrade, it doesn't just show a confirmation screen. The badge animates. It feels like an achievement unlocked. The inspiration? Games. Think about how games reward you. There's anticipation. There's celebration. There's a dopamine hit. Why can't B2B software do the same? 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘂𝗹𝘁: Client reaction: 🔥 Beta users: "This is so delightful." That's the feedback we design for. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗶𝗴𝗴𝗲𝗿 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁: B2B SaaS doesn't have to be boring. When did 'professional' start meaning sterile? Why do we accept enterprise software feeling like tax forms? But your users are still humans. They still respond to delight. They still notice when you sweat the details. If you integrate branding and motion into your product design from the start, you create a UX people genuinely love, not just tolerate. And that's rare in B2B. - SaaS founders: If you're a technical team at $500K-$1M ARR, and messy UX is blocking your growth to $10M, let's talk. Most designers have zero growth skills. Most growth experts have zero taste. We have both. DM me and I'll share how we've helped niche SaaS teams turn their Frankenstein UX into delightful experiences that convert.

"It's just a knowledge base. There's no emotional transformation here." I used to think this about some SaaS products. Then Talia Wolf shared what she found when researching a similar product: The emotional triggers were everywhere: → "I worked on something for weeks, then found out someone already tested it. It didn't work." → "I built something great and no one on the team even knows about it." → "Why are there so many silos? Why do I keep doing the same work twice?" These aren't feature requests. These are frustrations. The product isn't "a place to store documentation." It's: → Recognition for the work you've done → Relief from repetitive, wasted effort → Visibility across a fragmented team When they highlighted these emotions in messaging and A/B tests — huge impact. Every product solves an emotional problem. Even the "boring" ones. You just have to dig deeper than "what does it do?" and ask "how does it make them feel?" What emotional trigger is hiding inside your product that you haven't articulated yet? — P.S. Full episode with Talia Wolf in the comments.

@Kate Syuma made an observation about AI that I keep thinking about: "Your taste shows up in your prompts now." Here's the context. We were discussing how anyone can vibe-code a product these days. Give a prompt, get a UI. It's clean, it works. But Kate pointed out there are two paths: Path one: accept the defaults. Generic typography, common patterns, standard UI. The product looks fine but identical to everything else. Path two: iterate relentlessly. Challenge the output. Train the AI with better references. Push until it actually feels like something. She mentioned Tobias and MyMind as an example — every interaction, animation, and piece of copy feels intentional. You can tell someone cares about the details. The insight for SaaS builders: the barrier to "good enough" design has dropped. Which means "good enough" is no longer a differentiator. What separates products now is whether someone is willing to push past the first output. To notice what's generic and keep refining. You don't need to be a designer. You need to care enough to iterate. How are you using AI in your design process? Curious if others are finding ways to push past the defaults. P.S. Full episode with Kate in the comments.

50% of users churning after 3 months. I brought this real problem to Talia Wolf on my podcast. Her first question surprised me: "What are they doing in those three months that they don't need to do after?" Not: What feature are they missing? Not: Is the price too high? But: Do they even need your product after that point? She shared an example: A SaaS company discovered users only needed the product quarterly — to create reports. They weren't churning because they were unhappy. They just didn't need it daily. The fix? They switched to a credit system. Buy credits yearly, use them when needed. Suddenly "churn" became "expected usage pattern." Another example: Freelancer platforms where the first two hires happen on-platform, then the third goes to WhatsApp + PayPal. The lesson: Before you optimize onboarding or add features, understand the actual behavior. → What are they doing in the product? → When do they stop? → Is that a problem, or just how your product is used? Sometimes the answer isn't "fix retention." It's "change the business model." Have you mapped out what users actually do in their first 90 days? — P.S. Full episode with Talia Wolf in the comments.

A welcome message is just a modal, right? Text. Button. Done. That's how most teams treat it. Same component as every other notification. Same energy as a password reset. "We'll make it nicer later." Later never comes. But a welcome message isn't a notification. It's the first thing someone sees after they decide to trust you. The moment right after signup — when they're most curious, most hopeful, most open. That moment deserves more than a modal. On KnowledgeOwl, we designed this instead: An envelope rises from the bottom of the screen. It floats to the center. Opens. The letter slides out and reveals the message. It takes an extra second. That second builds anticipation. Same words. Completely different feeling. This didn't happen because we had extra time. It happened because we run two lanes — not one. Features and growth get a lane. Delight gets its own lane too. Both move forward every week. When delight has to squeeze in "when there's time," it never ships. When it has its own lane, it does. A modal says "here's some info." An envelope says "we're glad you're here." Your users feel the difference. Even if they can't name it.

@hrishio Thanks a lot Hrishi! 🙌

@JimZarkadas Awesome stuff, Jim. Here's to hitting your goal!

One year ago I set a goal that scared me. Not the excited kind of scared. The exposed kind. I decided to scale Love At First Try. Build a real team. Grow to $1M ARR by end of 2027. The goal wasn't the scary part. The scary part was the question that came after: "What serious designer would want to work for what I'm building?" I believed in it. But I'm the founder — of course I believe in it. That doesn't prove anything. I kept imagining the pitch. Me, trying to convince some talented designer to join a small operation that depends on one person figuring it out as they go. Why would they say yes? They could work at a company with a name. A brand. A salary that doesn't require faith. I didn't have a good answer. So I just kept building. --- One year later, Britt joined the team. Britt used to work at Zapier. When I pitched her the vision, I was honest about what we are and what we're not. Small team. No big brand name. But full ownership. Real creative work — not just growth metrics, but delight. A team with brand designers and motion designers so the work has art in it. And a system built around actually making designers better. That last part matters to me more than anything. Most tech companies pay well. But paying well doesn't mean you'll grow. There's no mentorship. No system. You're a resource, not someone being developed. At Love At First Try, every designer gets a mentor based on what they want to evolve in. AI. Creative direction. Whatever they care about. We invest in training because that's the whole point — building an environment where designers become better designers. Not just productive ones. Better ones. Britt saw that. And she chose it. --- That's when I realized my fear was wrong. I thought serious designers wanted the big name, the safe trajectory, the brand on their CV. Some do. But not all. The ones who care about ownership, creativity, and real growth? They're looking for something most companies don't offer. An environment that actually makes them better. If you're building a team: salary and brand aren't enough. The real question is — does your environment develop people? Most don't. If you're choosing where to work: ask the same question. Will this place make me better? Or just keep me busy? The environments that actually invest in growth are rare. And that's exactly what talented people are looking for. --- If you're new here — I'm Jim. I run Love At First Try, an in-house design team as a service for SaaS companies. My mission is to build one of the best environments for, passionate product designers who want to think like founders, lead design, and actually grow. Not just ship work. I am currently committed to adding 3 more designers and reaching $1M ARR by end of 2027. Brit Mackey — thank you for believing in this 🙏

"We'll add polish later." Later never comes. You know this. You've said it. Features ship, deadlines hit, and delight stays on the backlog forever. The problem isn't priorities. It's that delight doesn't have a lane. Growth has a lane. Features have a lane. Bugs have a lane. Delight? It's supposed to squeeze in somewhere. "When we have time." That's why it never happens. On ZenMaid's iOS app, we gave delight its own lane. Equal to growth. Equal to features. Every week, both lanes move. This loading animation came from that lane. Could've been a logo and a spinner. Functional. Forgettable. Instead — bubbles rising from the bottom. Calm. Clean. Zen. Something cleaning business owners actually feel before they even log in. It exists because delight had a seat at the table. Not leftovers. If delight keeps slipping in your product, it's not a time problem. It's a lane problem.

I ask every podcast guest: What's your favorite SaaS product right now? Talia Wolf's answer: Speechify. It's a tool where you upload any content and it reads it back to you. Here's why she loves it: She can almost double the speed and absorb way more than when reading an article. She uploads research, blog posts, long articles — anything she needs to study. Listening > reading for her. What I love about this answer: She didn't pick the fanciest tool. She picked the one that fits how her brain actually works. That's the insight for product builders: Your users have different learning styles, different workflows, different contexts. The products that win aren't the ones with the most features. They're the ones that fit naturally into how people already operate. What's a tool you use that just fits the way your brain works? — P.S. Full episode with Talia Wolf in the comments.

Kate Syuma said something on my podcast that I think every SaaS founder needs to hear: "If your core experience is broken, no amount of tooltips will save you." Here's what she means: Every product has a core value action — the one thing users need to do to experience why your product exists. Before you add onboarding layers, ask: is that core action actually working well? Because if it's buried, confusing, or clunky — you're not solving an onboarding problem. You're papering over a product problem. Kate shared that she's seen teams achieve 50% increases in activation just by fixing the core flow. No new tooltips. No checklists. Just making the main thing work better. This resonates with what we see constantly. Teams come to us wanting to "improve onboarding" when the real issue is the product experience itself. The signup flow is fine — it's what happens after that's broken. The best onboarding is when your product is intuitive enough that users don't need extra education. If you're adding tooltips to explain something, ask yourself: could we just make this clearer instead? P.S. Full episode with Kate in the comments.

Your most requested feature might be the worst thing you could build. Mitchell Tan 📮 from Kondo shared a framework on my podcast that I keep coming back to. Before building any feature, ask three questions: 1. Does it let you charge more? 2. Does it convert people who wouldn't otherwise pay? 3. Does it reduce churn? If the answer to all three is no — reconsider building it. Some features will make users happy. But they won't pay more for it. They won't churn without it. And it won't convince new people to buy. This isn't about ignoring users. It's about recognizing that we're running businesses, not maintaining hobby projects. The best product people can say "if we build this, we'll generate X more revenue" — and be right. That's the skill worth developing. Not just building what's requested. Building what actually moves the business forward. What's a feature you decided not to build — even though users kept asking for it? — P.S. Full episode with Mitchell Tan 📮 in the comments.

My biggest takeaways from Lewis Dingley (went from Renault, Sky, Dyson to designing AI-powered video tools at VEED.io): New episode just dropped. 1. You can't prototype AI features in Figma. When your product generates videos from text prompts, static screens don't cut it. You have to build with real APIs. Lewis vibe codes using Google AI Studio — he rebuilt VEED's text-to-video product in a single day. 2. Start with functionality, not UI when vibe coding. If you try to make it look nice from the start, the AI loses the functionality. Get it working first, then refine visuals. 3. Describe your design system in words, not screenshots. AI tools are bad at replicating UI from images. Describe it: "minimalist design, these buttons, this iconography." Then it generates consistent UI. 4. Prototypes get buy-in, static screens don't. A working prototype gets you "wow, yes." Static Figma screens get you "maybe, let me think about it." 5. The biggest barrier for users is starting from scratch. Don't ask users to write prompts. Give them visual presets they can click and tweak. At VEED, instead of typing "sunrise lighting," users click a visual example. 6. Technology moves faster than your roadmap. VEED spent months building an AI image editor. Then Kling released a model that does the same thing for video. Months of work obsolete overnight. Don't over-invest in scaffolding for today's model limitations. 7. The "obvious" AI feature might not be what users want. VEED built an AI agent that edits videos through chat. Nobody used it. They removed it. Sometimes users aren't ready for a new interaction pattern. 8. Design-minded leadership changes everything. VEED's CEO was a product designer. You don't have to spend 20 minutes explaining why something matters — they already have the eye for it. 9. Taste is personal, but you're designing for a group. Look at competitors, see what they're doing, then add your own ingredients. Lewis uses Mobbin instead of Dribbble — real products, not fantasy UI. 10. Big companies build your CV, startups give you ownership. At Dyson, Lewis was one designer among 50. At VEED, he prototypes something in 30 minutes and gets CEO approval the same day. Lewis Dingley — thanks for coming on 🙏 Full episode in the comments.

I found Lewis Dingley through Sabba Keynejad's posts. Sabba keeps sharing the cool AI features VEED is shipping — and I kept noticing how polished and well-designed everything looked. Eventually I had to find out who was behind the product design. That's how I landed on Lewis. His background is wild. Design school in France. Vehicle dashboards at Renault. TV products at Sky. Physical products at Dyson. And now — Senior Product Designer at VEED.io, designing AI-powered video tools. Why I wanted him on my podcast: Designing a generative AI video editor is nothing like designing a traditional SaaS product. You can't prototype text-to-video in Figma. You can't fake AI avatar interactions with static screens. The models evolve so fast that features you're building today might be obsolete next month. It forces you to design and think completely differently. Lewis vibe codes his prototypes with real AI models. He rebuilt VEED's entire text-to-video product in a single day using Google AI Studio. No engineering team. Just prompts and real APIs. That's the kind of thinking I wanted to understand. VEED is killing it right now. Great team. Great product. And Lewis is a big part of why their AI features feel so considered. Tomorrow I'm dropping our conversation. We went deep on vibe coding, why static prototypes don't work for AI, and what happens when new models make months of your work obsolete overnight. Lewis Dingley — thanks for making the time. Really enjoyed this one 🙏

Kate Syuma shared a counterintuitive lesson on my podcast: Don't remove all friction from your product. Users actually need to invest. She told me about an AI company that wanted the ultimate shortcut. User gives a prompt, gets the result, done. Zero effort. It didn't work. Users weren't sticking around. The reason: the IKEA effect. We value things more when we contribute to building them. That wobbly bookshelf you assembled? You're weirdly attached to it. Same applies to software. When users invest — give input, make choices, customize something — they become more attached to the outcome. That investment creates stickiness. So the goal isn't eliminating all effort. It's designing the right effort at the right moment. This is a useful frame for anyone rethinking their onboarding. Yes, reduce unnecessary friction. But don't strip away the moments where users shape their own experience. Frictionless isn't always better. Thoughtful friction builds products people stay with. Where in your product do users invest effort that actually makes them more committed? P.S. Full episode with Kate Syuma in the comments.

Your homepage is probably about you. It shouldn't be. Talia Wolf broke this down on my podcast: When you don't know why people really buy from you — what pain you actually solve, what outcome they're really looking for — you default to: → Our features → Our technology → Our pricing → How we work → Who's on our team It feels safe. It's what you know. But your customers don't care about you. They care about themselves. The shift: Instead of "We have automatic reports" → What does that mean for them? Instead of "AI-powered integrations" → Why should they care? Instead of "Built by experts" → How does that help them in life? Every claim. Every promise. Every feature. Run it through this filter: So what? Why should my customer care? When someone lands on your page, they should clearly see that this solution was made for them. Not that you're proud of what you built. Look at your homepage right now. Is it about you, or about them? — P.S. Full episode with Talia Wolf in the comments.

I asked Kate Syuma how she defines taste: Taste isn't something you're born with. It's built through exposure. She described it like this: you absorb things from everywhere — products you use, environments you're in, people you talk to. Over time, that trains what she calls your "visual literacy." Her practical approach: keep a mental list of 10-20 products you admire. Notion, Figma, Canva, Linear — whatever resonates with you. Then actually pay attention to how they evolve. How they change their positioning. How their product develops over time. It's like building a collection. And you have to revisit and refresh that collection regularly. The part that hit home for me: this takes years. There's no shortcut. But the muscle compounds, and eventually you start noticing things others miss. For those of us building SaaS without a design background, this is actually reassuring. You don't need formal training. You need intentional exposure and the habit of noticing what makes something feel good. What products are on your "taste list" right now? Curious what everyone's paying attention to. P.S. Full episode with Kate in the comments.

My biggest takeaways from Kate Syuma (6+ years at Miro, now advising Autodesk, ManyChat, and Dealfront on activation): New episode just dropped. 1. Taste is built through exposure, not talent. Keep a list of 10-20 products you admire and study how they evolve over time. Revisit it regularly. It takes years to build this muscle, but it compounds. 2. In the AI era, your taste shows up in your prompts. Anyone can vibe-code a product now. But the person who iterates and trains the AI with better references will stand out. Generic prompts produce generic UI. 3. The best onboarding is when you don't need one. If your product requires heavy tooltips to be usable, that's a product problem — not an onboarding problem. The goal is intuitive UX, not more education layers. 4. Tooltips and checklists are dying. Users skip them. Kate sees AI voice assistants (like Obby by Core) as the replacement — real-time guidance that adapts to what the user is doing. Human-feeling, but self-serve. 5. Agentic AI will change how we use complex software. Instead of clicking through menus, you'll tell an embedded agent what you want and watch it happen. Tools like Foldspace already do this. The concept of "learning the UI" starts to disappear. 6. Domain matching is an underrated activation lever. If someone signs up with the same company domain as an existing user, prompt them to join that workspace. Mobin did this and saw 20% more expansion revenue. 7. Fix your core value action before adding onboarding layers. If that core experience is broken, no tooltips will save you. Kate's seen 50% activation lifts just from fixing the core flow. 8. Your first "aha moment" should happen in under 60 seconds. Use AI to pre-fill content or generate a proof of concept on signup. It's not the real aha — but it builds momentum. 9. Don't remove all friction — users need to invest. The IKEA effect applies to SaaS. If users put in zero effort, they won't value the outcome. 10. Human touch still wins, but it can scale. At Miro, Kate's team embedded pre-recorded videos of real humans into onboarding. It felt personal but was fully self-serve. AI voice assistants are the next evolution. Kate Syuma — thanks for coming on 🙏 Full episode in the comments.

I found Kate Syuma on LinkedIn about a year ago and immediately hit follow. Most growth people talk about funnels and metrics. Kate talks about the intersection of growth AND delight — and she comes from design, not just growth. She spent 6+ years at Miro — joined when they were 50 people, left when they were nearly 2,000. She was their first Growth Designer and eventually became Head of Growth Design. During that time, Miro went from startup to $17.5B unicorn. She built a team of 10+ designers and shaped their growth strategies across acquisition, retention, and monetization. Now she runs GrowthMates — her advisory practice helping B2B SaaS companies like Autodesk, ManyChat, and Dealfront figure out activation and onboarding. She also hosts the Growthmates Podcast where she's interviewed people from Dropbox, Pinterest, Adobe, Atlassian, Amplitude, Canva, HubSpot, and Intercom. Why I wanted her on my podcast: She's one of the few people who lives at the intersection of UX and growth — and actually cares about both. She calls it "user-centric product growth." Growth that doesn't sacrifice quality or delight. That's rare. Most growth advice optimizes for numbers at the expense of the product. Kate's approach is the opposite — she believes what's good for the user is good for the business. Tomorrow I'm dropping our conversation. We went deep on taste, AI changing onboarding, and how to get users to value faster. Kate Syuma — thanks for making the time. Really enjoyed this one 🙏

Stop asking customers what they love about your product. Ask this instead: "If you could no longer use this product tomorrow, what would you miss the most?" Talia Wolf shared this on my podcast. It's now my favorite customer research question. Here's why it works: "What do you love about us?" → Generic answers. "What would you miss?" → Visceral, emotional responses. When you threaten to take something away, people reveal what actually matters. Talia said they've literally had customers reply: "Please don't take this away." It's just a survey question. But it unlocks: → The features that actually drive retention → The emotional value you didn't know you provided → Copy that writes itself The difference between "why did you sign up?" and "what was happening in your life that made you look for a solution?" is the difference between surface-level answers and gold. What's your go-to question for understanding why customers actually stay?

Your SaaS might be fast. But does it feel fast? I was talking with Mitchell Tan 📮 from Kondo on my podcast about something that stuck with me. When they launched, users said Kondo felt slower than Superhuman. So they measured it. Millisecond by millisecond. The response times were identical. But Superhuman felt faster. Why? Micro-animations most users never consciously notice: → When you archive, the row slides out smoothly → When you move your mouse up-right, highlights respond slower (you might be heading to the side panel) → When you move down-left, highlights respond faster (you're clearly navigating rows) They track mouse direction and adjust UI response accordingly. This is the difference between software that works and software that feels considered. Your users often can't articulate why your product feels "clunky." They just know it doesn't feel as good as the tools they love. The fix isn't always faster servers. Sometimes it's a 200ms animation. Have you ever added a small animation or transition that noticeably changed how your product felt to users? — P.S. Full episode with Mitchell Tan 📮 in the comments.

The internet makes you feel like you're never doing enough. Everyone's "cracked AI." Everyone has systems that do everything for them. Everyone's living their best life making bazillions of dollars. Most of us? We're just typing thoughts into ChatGPT hoping it understands. That's why this headline stopped me mid-scroll: "Turn your lazy prompts into great ones." It's from Prompt Cowboy — a tool that takes your messy prompt and makes it better. I shared it with Talia Wolf on my podcast as an example of emotional targeting done right. Her take: It works because it speaks to how people actually feel. Not the feature. The emotion. → You're not lazy. You're human. → You don't need a 47-step prompt framework. → You just want your messy thoughts organized. Your users aren't buying features. They're buying relief from how they feel right now. When you write copy for your SaaS — are you describing what it does, or how it makes people feel? — P.S. Full episode with Talia Wolf in the comments.